Why you should buy a NAS

There are many reasons why network attached storage (NAS) makes a great addition to your home or small office. Maybe you're sick of paying monthly cloud service fees, or maybe you need a lot more storage space than you currently have. A NAS allows for centralized file management, and, in some cases, adds a layer of security over your files. We'll help get you headed in the right direction when it comes to ditching the cloud and getting serious about network attached storage.

Ease of use

Setting up a NAS is relatively easy — you don't need to have much more technological savvy than it took to set up Windows and navigate to this web page. Fill the NAS with drives, plug it in, and attach it to your network either wirelessly or with an Ethernet cable. Although NAS units have their own processor, motherboard, and RAM, most are controlled through an internet browser using a simple interface designed to be suitable for all users. You will have it set up and storing your data in no time.

Peace of mind

Most computer users can relate to losing data. Your computer was infected with a virus and you had to reformat and ended up losing everything. Your hard drive failed. The SD card with your not-yet-backed-up vacation photos vanished. It happens.

A NAS can ultimately help you to avoid these scenarios. Files are saved on the NAS and accessed by your PC, meaning you won't lose any data if your PC hard drive or OS fails. A RAID 5 NAS setup using four drives allows for a drive to fail completely without losing any data. Replace the faulty drive and get back to work; the volume will be rebuilt in a few hours and you can still access your data, albeit it slowly, during the process.

Storage space

A common problem among PC users is a lack of storage space. Imagine: your desktop has three hard drives already, and you need to add more for all the 4K movies you just bought. Instead of transferring your files from one hard drive to another, larger hard drive, invest in a NAS. It can be expanded, and it can be accessed by multiple people from multiple devices. If you want to get particularly crazy with your backups, keep in mind that it's much easier to back up a single location (i.e. your NAS) than it is to back up multiple computers. All types of user will find an appropriate NAS, as they range in storage size from hundreds of gigabytes to several terabytes.

File sharing

Having a hub in your home for movies, songs, photos, and games is easy to achieve with a NAS. Say you have movies on your beast of a desktop in the office upstairs, but your TV is in the rec room downstairs. Your NAS makes it easy to access those files from any other computer in the house, including the Xbox One attached to your TV.

Small businesses and offices will benefit from multiple people being able to manage, store, version, and backup files from a single location instead of spreading out across all the machines in the office. Conversely, it is much easier for one person to access multiple files belonging to one project when they're kept on a centralized hub rather than multiple computers. USB printers that are not capable of wireless printing can be shared across the office or home with NAS.

Transfer speeds

Transfer speeds between computers and a NAS using a Gigabit Ethernet connection can technically get up to 125MB/s, but most hard drives can only reach transfer speeds of about 70MB/s. Compare this with a cloud service where your transfer speeds are limited by your internet plan, bandwidth usage, and even the cloud service itself.

The average internet speed in the United States is about 12MB/s, a way lower transfer speed than what you can expect from a NAS. Wouldn't you rather be limited by advancements in technology than by how much you're paying an internet or cloud service provider?

No access outages

Because the NAS is in-home and connected with Wi-Fi or Gigabit Ethernet, you won't experience any access outages if your ISP craps out or if your cloud service goes down (maintenance!). As mentioned above, a RAID 5 NAS setup can even survive the complete failure of one of its drives without losing any data or experiencing downtime.

Organization software

Many NAS units come with software that makes setting up and using your network a snap. Some map your storage for easy access, while others allow you to set up a cloud for internet access anywhere. Most NAS units will include sync software, but these options will change depending on what NAS unit you buy.

Security

Most NAS units feature some type of encryption for disk volumes. This adds another level of security on top of the fact that your drives can be, if you wish, kept off the public internet. If your laptop is stolen it won't have your files on it — they're kept secure and separate on your NAS. In an office setting, it's much easier to keep tabs on one centralized NAS rather than multiple computers. Users might give individual computers access that isn't exactly secure, and you could suffer from the vulnerability before it is noticed.

Price

The price of a quality four-bay NAS unit ranges from about $450 to $550, and the price of a 2TB hard drive is currently hovering around the $50 mark. If you were to create a badass four-drive RAID 5 setup with four 2TB drives, you'd have to spend about $800. Your storage capacity minus data redundancy would be 6TB.

Now consider the price of Google Drive. For the same amount of storage space you'd be paying $60 per month — that's or $720 per year! You can see how a NAS quickly pays for itself.

I bought a QNAP NAS a year ago. I'm no IT expert, but not a complete novice. I didn't like the experience. Why not?
* I bought a Windows 10 based Media PC, and wanted to store files on the NAS so that I could also access the files using a laptop. I wanted to run apps/applications on the Windows PC and simply read files from the NAS (or store files to the NAS).
* It turned out I couldn't store files from Windows 10 by default... I had to...
-- first create a new user on the NAS
-- if I didn't choose the same user name and password as on my Windows 10 setup, nothing worked properly
-- I had to give write access to the "multimedia" directory on my user
-- there was not really any information about what I had to do, and I had to do endless googling to find the required information
* I ripped my DVDs and Blu-rays and stored them on the NAS (yes, I only ripped disks I have purchased myself -- zero download of "shared" movies, and I don't let others get copies of my movies)
-- after a few weeks of ripping, the NAS started complaining: it turned out there was less than 20% vacant space on the NAS
-- before the whining started, I had seen zero information that I needed to have 20% vacant... maybe I should have known, but I didn't think of it
* Several apps/applications on my media PC had problems accessing movie files on the NAS. As an example, VLC didn't work well

So far, the whole NAS thing was a very negative experience. My impression is that you need to be relatively literate wrt. IT to use this. And note, this is not meant to criticize QNAP -- I have no reason to think that other systems are better -- QNAP regularly scores very high in NAS tests.

To resolve the problem of accessing files, I bought a Drobo 5C. This set-up is very easy to use. Only "problems"... (a) the Drobo has to be located next to the media PC, i.e., next to my TV -- I'd prefer to put it away in an office or something, (b) It is not so simple to access files from another computer (I can of course just unplug the Drobo and plug it into the other computer, etc., but less elegant).

Then I wanted to use the NAS for back-up from the Drobo. Well, I found that my media PC had Windows 10 home, which doesn't come with a back-up program (the W10 Pro does, I think). I found some freeware back-up programs, but they didn't work when backing up from a USB disk to a NAS...

Personally, I'd rather use some simple "Windows Server" or even "Windows 10" based machine for back-up/as "NAS" -- so that only have to relate to one OS. So if anyone has any suggestions for a PC with a cabinet with room for 5-8 disks with RAID support, etc., and how to connect a media PC to the "server" PC, I'm interested.

You have to create a login and a password to use a PC or a tablet or a phone. I am sure everyone understand why you would need the same for the NAS to choose who have access to what.
If you find it complicated, how did you setup your phone or PC?

Also, i don't know where this 20% is coming from. In my Synology NAS, one of the disk (used as a backup for the 3 others in RAID is 99% full and the backup still works.

Synology NAS works perfectly with VLC or whatever video player, it just give any PC access to the data like it would be on the hard drive, it comes with backup utilities you can install on your PC to backup automatically on the NAS themfolderd of your choice...
I heard also only good things about QNAP but i am surprised with the limitations and problems you have experienced

The safe is a good option not only for fires but also simple theft. I saw some nice safes the other day that had provision for power sockets and sometimes ethernet connections, while still maintaining their external fire & flood protection ratings. I don't know how it would work in an enclosed space, but I was thinking it would be a great idea to have a small NAS (or an external HDD with ethernet) inside the safe for secondary backups. I was actually thinking of running an ethernet cable to my workshed (in the backyard, 10m from the house) to ensure it is physically separate should catastrophe strike. One of those 'powerline adapters' (ethernet over power) might do the trick too. Obviously you still have to worry about lightning strikes, but I always unplug most of my stuff during lightning storms anyway.

Disk malfunction is not the only risc around, ever heard of theft and fire? A cloud service protects against it all. As for the internet speeds, the USA appears to be a retarded country. 100 Mb/s up/down is the new norm here. Have a Microsoft Office 365 home subscription with 5 accounts for about $100 annually. That is 5 times of 1 TB OneDrive storage. Share 4 of them to the 5th account and you have got 5 TB you can access in one go wherever you are.

And delete by mistake a folder locally or on the Cloud with the changes replicated and you are screwed!
Is there really people thinking that the Cloud is a backup?
I am using OneDrive which is great but this is simply no backup at all.

I have had a NAS for a long time, but you know what? Windows 10 Mobile cannot access Samba or AFS shares. My BlackBerry 10 could, my iPhone with VLC and similar could, etc, but not MS' own mobile OS and applications. Great!

Yeap, moved to NAS soon after I heard about the OneDrive cap change. Now I have a 2TB redudant RAID with Synology. They have good apps for Windows Mobile to view files, pictures, and movies over intranet and internet. Anyone interested should look at the Disk Station Play versions.

NAS are handy and important for local media and local extended storage purposes. At a minimum, however, people should get used to secondary site storage and cloud is one way to accomplish that with an extremely low entry barrier. Once you're accustomed to backing up key documents and build a strategy for what should be readily accessible anywhere (i.e. cloud with local sync like OneDrive, etc), then the strategy for longer term owned local storage might be more palatable. Even basic 2x+ spindle units that are already built (i.e. WD, Toshiba, LaCie, Seagate) are good suppliments to local machine/ cloud storage. More expensive NAS units might be too complicated for the average Joe but are certainly worth the investment.

NAS is to keep the system up and running, Baackup is for when **** hits the fan and recovery. IMO (and as many others say) NAS is a backup however if malware infects your system NAS can be too. You need to store backups on different types of media and use versioning so you can roll back. A comination of NAS, cloud, USB stick, CD's, fire proof safe or deposit box in a bank, non internet connected drive or machine, an expert even suggested Microfilm as it lasts several hundred years (if you need it I guess) - For consumers I guess 3 is good for important data.

The best bang for buck for storage especially for multi-terabyte/petabyte is tape. You can pick up second LTO drives fairly cheap from eBay or company liquidations and you can get a Dell Controller card fairly cheap as well. I've picked up both for less than £500... Tapes are dirt cheap brand new as well, often about £15 per cartridge when bought in bulk and tapes can store up to aroudn 6Tb (native) on a cartridge.

Cloud is fine but for several aspects, you reliant on them being around for a long time. Companies can fail often without any warning (just look at Mega) and your data is vulnerable to interception and/or privacy concerns unless you do heavy duty encryption at source. Another concern about cloud storage is the glacial speed of pulling data back down and uploading. Most Internet connections are limited to 5Mb unless you have fibre up to 100mb links, if you have cable then you can have higher but again that depends on country and upload speeds are often crippled to a fraction of the download speed. Long term the cost of running cold storage like a Cloud is often questionable especially when you're talking about terabytes of data and managing the data on the server especially once encrypted is a logistical nightmare when you have thousands if not millions of files and multiple generations of those files.

I gave up on tape over 20 years ago. Too slow. Serial, so you had to know where the file was, which sometimes involved putting the index tape in, finding which tape of the set had your file, putting that in, waiting interminably while it hunted and finally brought the file back. Reading your comment made me shiver just to think of it. Purely as a secondary or tertiary backup, perhaps. If you subsequently got infected by ransomware the tape would be unaffected but anything connected live might be.

Cloud most certainly doesn't beat anything. Terms and conditions change with vendors. So, while you are extremely likely to be safe, there is still a chance. I know enough professionals that have taken chances and when it comes down to it, having to recover data from a failed disk manually (replacing HDD circuit boards, and the like) is an expensive or at least tedious proposition. Cloud only helps if you can guarantee your connection and relative "ownership" of the storage you are borrowing. For some providers, your privacy is also up for grabs.

Really ? Scroogle Drive ? I think I just got a little barf in my mouth. Anyway.. pretty hard for 'most' consumers to justify a NAS.. they are not magic either.. using JBOD that have very short MTBF. If you have that much data (i.e. multiple TB's) maybe, but even still you need backups.. NAS is not magic... it stil has sinlge points of failure. YMMV - I agree with gregsedwards I'm not real swimmingly with the tone of the article either... this coming from an enterprise IT manager.. ;)

Just buy yourself the slowest PC configuration(probably 5yr old second-hand device) you can find, remove DVD and sloppy drives, put there at least 3 hard drives of any capacity, then install any no-display/no-DE linux distribution, set up samba, and you've got most of the security settings domain controllers provide, along with NAS functionality. Also drop there any torrent client with web interface, and you've got yourself a nice, cheap, and effective NAS with blackjack and . Buying 2 2TB drives is another question though... Btw, any organization has some outdated hardware, if it is at least 5 years old, so you don't even have to buy anything.

Of course, this isn't "buy, put this cable there, and it works", but the setting up will take up to 5 hours of lazy googling, if you don't know what to do. If you do, it's a matter of 15 minutes after turning it on.

If you have to deploy 10k of such devices, just create an image and replicate it to other hard drives, for each device. Linux doesn't give a crap about a sudden change of hardware. Yes, that's sad egg thrown right into windows'face. All this deployment crap that I have to make through every time when new PCs arrive...

I'm still rocking my old HP MediaSmart EX495 Windows Home Server. I bought it back in 2010 and it's been running 24x7 since. I've had no issues with it other than a failed drive or two which I hot swapped without taking the server down. I did lose the system drive once which required a reinstall of the OS, but no data was lost. It provides plenty of storage for my household and the backup agents and backup management couldn't be easier to use. The drive technology works great and allows use of mismatched drives, much easier than dealing with a RAID solution.

I've looked at other NAS solutions over the years, everything from home built linux boxes to Synology, QNAP, and Drobo, but I haven't been able to justify moving yet. Eventually the old WHS will die, but so far, it's been dead on reliable.

You can access your NAS from any device with an internet connection same way as cloud, you also have dedicated Apps that give you MUCH more options on devices. 4K is here, files are large, I have 3 TB of films none 4k, i gulp at the amount of storage required. Likes of Microsoft ditched unlimited storage and its nowhere near the speed and capacity (whatever you can afford) of your own NAS.

It's actually about being LESS private with your files... instead of having everything tucked away on a specific PC, you can have all your files & backups in one place so that everyone on the same network can access them.

I have a synology nas, (2x 4TB) and use it a lot for backup, movies, photo's (backup),... And I realy love their W10 App for movies and photo's. Now hoping there will be more apps coming soon! (or use Android/IOS or just the .exe software & web)

Songs & photo's are on onedrive so it is easy to use with W10 (Photo's app & Groove)

From what I understand Synology is the "Gold" standard of NAS. I went with Drobo 5N instead. The benifit (for me) was that I can use any size HHD - they did not have to be all same size drives. After plugging it in and installing the software - I have not really done anything. It just works - well we will find out when one of the drives f's up.

Synology does not need to have the same drive capacity in each bay. I have an older Drobo FS and Synology DS-1515+. When it comes to apps/performance/upgradeability the Syn is way better than the Drobo, especially if you can get it on sale. I almost went with a new model Drobo decided on Synology based on media streaming results.

It would be nice if these articles would list the pros and cons of products and solutions, otherwise it could end up being a disservice to users if they get in over their head or have regrets. Here's one glaring con that anyone thinking about NAS needs to consider: drives in NAS must be the identical size, or storage capacity. That means if you have a 4-drive NAS, all of them need to be 1TBx4, or 2TBx4, etc. you cannot mix and match different sizes. In practical terms, this can be a significant issue - imagine purchasing 2TBx4 NAS, 2 years from now one drive fails, and the best value drive size is now 4TB. Guess what? You have to get 2TB even if it's not the best value to maintain the existing NAS, or dump all the functional 2TB drives and replace them all with 4TB. Or what happens if you outgrow the storage? You need to replace *all* the drives, not being able to replace one larger drive at a time.

A comment from gregsedwards​ also highlights another issue - complexity. You probably noticed that NAS solutions and brands vary in review ratings, many negative experiences due to the complexity and software used - they all have their proprietary Linux-based UI, which can make the difference between success and failure, satisfied or headaches.

And I was wondering which TRUELY GOOD model of 2TB drive Wells for around $50. I still buy Hitachi drives or WD Black for quality and performance because I don't want to skimp when it comes to peace of mind.

Woodman, definitely agree that there are some cons to NAS (& RAID) -- including complexity. But it's not exactly true that NAS requires identically sized drives -- many newer NAS devices let you mix and match drives sizes and types at will (e.g. Drobo, and others). RAID, however, has more limits on practical outcome of using heterogeneous drives (e.g. the smallest drive becomes the (proportional) limiter on how much free storage is available.) But even then, most RAID controllers allow heterogeneous drives in a single array. (You just might not get that size or speed you expected if you do that.)

As with all technology, there are pros and cons and people who can benefit and others less so.

There are several RAID setups that do not require the same size hard drives, though some will limit the effective size of the disks to that of the smallest disk size. Or you can apparently setup equal sized virtual disks in a software raid. I'm not familiar with it, just stating there are other options and your response is not fully correct, Woodman, as you could still buy a new "best value" disk and end up with the RAID working just as it was, but some extra space is not utilized.

Definately the way to go. After MS pulled the unlimted offer from under everyones feet I decided to build my own storage. Synology 2015xs with 8x WD Red 6TB drives running in RAID 10, maybe 2x SDD for read/write cache (need to read more about this as im still a noob in this area), 10 GbE network is what I want, will build a PC soon that has that, probably all out and get the new 10 core Intel processor and 2x Nvidia 1080 in SLI. Want something that I wont have to worry about for 5 years.

As a long-time NAS user, I'm a bit divided on the tone of this article. I've used various NAS solutions over the years, and while they do have a place in the technology infrastructure of power users, I'm not sold on whether everyone needs to bother with one. The complexities of setup, configuration, and management still make them inaccessible to the average consumer. Most people's eyes glaze over when they hear "RAID." Back in the old days, I had a multi-drive Linksys NAS, and I damn near lost everything, because one of the drives started to fail and it turns out I had misconfigured it. After that, my wife rightly insisted that a cloud-based backup solution had to be incorporated into our setup. For a couple of years, I continued saving everything locally to my NAS and backing that up to Carbonite, but they started making that more and more challenging, so I switched over to OneDrive for my personal stuff. I currently have a WD MyCloud, and it's good for what I need to do with it. Mostly I use it as a media server for streaming ripped movies and TV shows around my home. For photos, documents, music, and other everyday stuff, I much prefer my OneDrive to my NAS. OneDrive is available wherever, whenever I need it, makes sharing/co-authoring simple, and provides better backup redudancy than I could manage with a local storage solution. My wife still routinely insists that I copy stuff off of our OneDrive accounts to the NAS "for backup purposes," but by and large, I just keep all of my important stuff on OneDrive.

I do agree with you to some degree, but I have had different Nas models and makes over the years and I find that they have actually gotten easier and easier to set-up. Yes the average user may have to do a little research, but not enough to say it would be too complicated. The complications will come when they get into more than just storage. The synlogy os is a great tool for many users. I do agree with others that they are pricey, but for me as a personal preference I like know that I have my files secure and in my possession and easily and quickly accessed regardless of internet connection.

The Cloud is NOT a backup. This basic misconception is a big problem because people think that they are safe with data in the cloud..until they delete by mistake some folders and they lose all the datas inside forever.
NAS nowadays are super simple to use and configure and is a no brainer purchase to advise.

Moved from NAS to cloud and Im much happier for it initially great but take my advice back up offline my linux nas drive died leaving me unable to get to any of the data of the discs, some of which were fried by the over heated has box.

Just hope there's no physical damage to the device once you have all of your pictures and files moved over to it. Fire, tornado, flood, spilled coffee, etc. could result in a complete loss. At least with the cloud, it's backed up on multiple copies and recoverable in the event of a disaster.

You can make backup to off site NAS (which we do in the family between my father, brother and me), you can make a backup in the cloud of your choice (including Amazon S3, Crashplan...).
On the other side, for data only in the cloud, there NO backup as the data are synchronized so if your data change / are lost on the Cloud or on the local computer, they are gone forever.

I have 2 Synology NAS enclosures (ds214+ and a ds716) and you can't go wrong. Even better, they have Windows apps for music, video and photo sharing. I can also initiate and monitor torrent downloads from my phone, check the status of both, setup external download links for friends and more... And these are apps from Synology... Not 3rd party like my old d-link nas.

While both are 2-drive units, the 716 is expendable to 7 drives using a 5 bay addon (which is expensive).

I think it's silly to say "cloud be gone". Unless you're willing to go through a bunch of pain, you can't access your NAS stuff outside your own network (at least, not securely). The cloud, properly setup, is the way to deal with that. I have a combination. I've setup a Windows 8.1 computer specifically as a local server, but the account used on it also is setup with OneDrive so that things are sync'd to the cloud. This means we can access local media very quickly but my family can also access it via OneDrive anywhere in the world. Best of both worlds.

Same exact setup for me. Used to do local only for years, now also pay such a small price for OneDrive yearly to also sync that content. OneDrive makes it easy to share and view from anywhere. No more ftp or jenky web setup for sharing externally, best of both worlds. Would highly recommend.

Agreed you cannot say do away with cloud, House fire, theft !! All you data is gone. A NAS has a place but I do think for most consumer they are not required these days. The cost fair out weighes them. Yes there will be those who have tonnes of data in ripped moves and music and they do make sense. But for go public no. Better off with onedrive and crashplan for recovery

Of course you can access your data outside of your home network, as safely as the Cloud. Even more: you can configure 2AF, you can select the access right to be for instance read-only on media or do not give access at all to sensible folder outside of the network.. There is plenty of way of making it much more secure than the cloud that usually with login-password (which for most people is the same on every website) give access to everything.

I have a secure VPN server on my NAS and it does NAS-to-NAS back ups over to a remote location and give me remote access to my media. Synology makes this stupidly easy to do as long as you have a fixed IP or use their proxy domain service. My two NAS solutions sync overnight over the broadband connection automatically and then backed up to tape once a week.

Expensive? Sure, but I have around 6Tb of company data, that excludes personal stuff.

I can't say this isn't an idea that hasn't arrived. I'm in a situation like this in my home office and it might be worth the investment to do something like this. Especially in light of how Microsoft put the brakes on my online storage aspirations.

Love my 2TB WD MyCloud! The only drawback is that I have never been able to get the Groove app to really work with NAS drives (giving the "not indexed" error half the time). It works sometimes, but not others.

Most NAS are extremely overpriced. If you have some extra time you can build one yourself for that $400 that will have a much more powerful CPU that you can use to run applications on. Of course if you don't have much extra time or just don't feel like dealing with it, off-the-shelf NAS solutions could be the right choice. Once you get into 8-bay or higher than it gets real hard to justify them though.

Precisely why I went with the grizzly bear, a Drobo 5N. If I'm gonna spend money, make it worth my time. Remote webpage portal access, super simple management, recovery services if it dies...

Drobo anecdote - I saw the drives I use, 3TB 7200rpm varierty, on sale at Amazon. Bought one to add a forth, they shipped it, I took it out of the box and put it in hte next drive bay and in fifteen to thirty minutes it was formatted, integrated and showing pretty green lights with files had been distributed across all four drives. I didn't log in to add it, didn't ask it to rebuidlt eh array, no scary pop-up warnings, I didn't do a thing.

And I have a Synology NAS where I wanted to expand the capacity. Just removed the 2TB disk and put new fresh 4TB disk one by one. Nothing to do (no format, no login, no scary pop-up, ..) the NAS rebuilt the RAID data on the new disk without any fuss.
I think that people promoting DIY NAS just have no clue how the current generation on Synology or QNAP NAS are working...

I did the whole media center PC, never used it. Maybe because I don't torrent movies, but streaming services have taken over the Sonos, especially Groove and Soundcloud playlists. Photos are available from the Drobo over the network or internet. Roku has my Netflix and Amazon covered. The Media PC was lonely.

This non sense and myth has to stop. First, it is NOT significantly cheaper. But you forego a lot of functionalities and convenience while being immensely more complicated to use and set it up.
Each time someone ist claiming that and you start to challenge it with numbers and functionalities, it is debunked.
If you cannot afford a NAS, so be it but building itself is not a viable alternative.

This non sense and myth has to stop. First, it is NOT significantly cheaper. But you forego a lot of functionalities and convenience while being immensely more complicated to use and set it up.
Each time someone ist claiming that and you start to challenge it with numbers and functionalities, it is debunked.
If you cannot afford a NAS, so be it but building itself is not a viable alternative.

This non sense and myth has to stop. First, it is NOT significantly cheaper. But you forego a lot of functionalities and convenience while being immensely more complicated to use and set it up.
Each time someone ist claiming that and you start to challenge it with numbers and functionalities, it is debunked.
If you cannot afford a NAS, so be it but building itself is not a viable alternative.

$150-160 for a 4gb storage My Live Cloud box. I would recommend a backup unit or a backup external drive as well. Literally, you could share it with a whole family and share the cost. I use OneDrive from time to time, but its usually for temporary purproses to give files to people outside of my normal group. Cost wise... its much cheaper in the mid/long-term than a service... unless you get some type of crazy deal.